Shake was an image compositing package used in the post-production industry. Shake was widely used in visual effects and digital compositing for film, video and commercials. Shake exposed its node graph architecture graphically. It enabled complex image processing sequences to be designed through the connection of effects "nodes" in a graphical workflow interface. This type of compositing interface allowed great flexibility, including the ability to modify the parameters of an earlier image processing step "in context" (while viewing the final composite). Many other compositing packages, such as Blender, eyeon Fusion, Nuke and Cineon, also used a similar node-based approach.

On July 30, 2009, Apple discontinued Shake.[3] No direct product replacement had been announced by Apple, but some features are now available in Final Cut Studio and Motion, such as the SmoothCam filter.[4]

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Shake was originally developed by programmers and supervisors from Sony Imageworks including Arnaud Hervas, Emmanuel Mogenet, Ron Brinkmann, Louis Cetorelli, and Dan Candela[citation needed]. In 1996, Arnaud Hervas, along with Allen Edwards founded Nothing Real, and released Shake as its flagship product in 1997. Version 2 was released in 1999 for Windows NT and IRIX, costing $9900 US per license, or $3900 for a render-only license.

In 2002, Apple Computer acquired Nothing Real.[5] A few months later, they released version 2.5,[6] which introduced Mac OS X compatibility. To strengthen the Mac's position in production studios, the Mac version held a price of $4950 US, and users of the non-Mac operating systems were given the offer of doubling the number of licenses at no extra cost by migrating to Mac OS X. In 2003, version 3 of Shake was announced,[7] which introduced the Qmaster software, discontinued support for Microsoft Windows, and allowed unlimited network render clients at no additional cost. A year later, the release of Shake 3.5 at the National Association of Broadcasters show saw the price drop to $2999 for Mac OS X and $4999 for Linux and IRIX.

In April 2005 Apple announced Shake 4 at a pre-NAB event. New features included 3D multi-plane compositing, 32-bit Keylight and Primatte keying, Optical Flow image processing (time-remapping and image stabilisation), Final Cut Pro 5 integration and extensions to their open, extensible scripting language and SDK. Shake 4 had no IRIX version.

At the NAB event in April 2006, Apple announced that Shake 4.1 would be a Universal Binary version and would ship in May that year. It was actually released on June 20, 2006 and was rebranded as a companion for Final Cut Studio;[8] as such, its price was dropped from $2999 to $499 for Mac OS X (but remained the same for Linux). At the same time, Apple also announced that they would end support for Shake. Rumor web sites claimed that Apple was working on a next-generation compositing application codenamed Phenomenon.[9] Existing maintenance program subscribers had the option to license the Shake source code for $50,000 USD.

On July 30, 2009, Apple removed Shake from its online store and website. Shake had been officially EOL 3 years ago but was still being sold in the Apple Store for $499 until that time.[10] The Shake website now redirects to Apple's Final Cut Pro X website.

Shake was also used for video post-production, but in this field Autodesk's Flint, Flame and Inferno systems were usually used in conjunction with Shake for a fast turnaround of projects. Shake's historical strength had been the ability to work better with very high resolution formats such as 2K, 4K and IMAX used in the motion picture industry.